Your mission, should you choose to accept it

[james_davis_nicoll]

In an article referenced in an article reference here, Ken MacLeod said:

It's just rare to see stories written about a future that the writer believes in and the reader can get excited about - let alone one they'd like to live in. What we need is a new intellectual engagement with the real possibilities, coupled with a new confidence in humanity's capacity to deal with them.

Outline such a future [of your own creation]. Extra points for not tucking "embrace poverty" into it in one form or another, not creating a backswing setting [1], not praising the virtues of oligarchy or dictatorship and on and so forth. In other words, outline my Nightmarish Future or something equally attractive.

I have a report to do on something that is the exact opposide of MNF so my entry will have to wait until tomorrow.

1: Settings where the author slaughters ninety nine of a hundred people to give his characters more room for their sword's backswing. I think Andrew Wheeler invented the term. He certainly has expressed distaste for settings that as a side-effect wipe out his kids.

Comments

[daveon.livejournal.com]

I have a feeling we're going to all end up living with the bastard child of bureaucratic authoritarnism and social liberalism where we end up with a block of "don't scare the horses" exceptions to things that people worry about now, but don't blink at having every single aspect of our lives recorded, measured and monitored.

We're already seeing this with the degree to which people don't seem to care about people knowing who they are and where they are to a degree that makes me twitchy.

Having said that, I'm far more relaxed about online life now I have a Green Card - before I got that I was having the heeby geebies about people doing a search on me as part of the FBI checks, even if I had nothing to hide.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

The authoritarians are particularly keen on "if you have done nothing wrong you have nothing to be afraid of".

They tend to forget or ignore the possibilities that (a) social norms change over time (that which was legal becomes illegal, and vice versa) but data retention is forever and permits retroactive trawls for past behaviour that wasn't considered bad at the time, and (b) their searches may throw up false positives, which it hurts to be on the receiving end of.

I bring this up not to preach but to point out some possible friction sources in mid to late 21st century politics.

[daveon.livejournal.com]

I think you'll find a lot of the "younger" generation also have a degree of that attitude too. At least based on reactions when this gets discussed with people in their 20s of my aquaintance.

I can see a shift to things being less admisable in courts simply because statutes of limitations will run out faster and there will be tightened rules on what you need to bring things to a legal setting. Otherwise the system would probably fall apart all by itself.

One scenario for punishment: you get dumped off the grid for a period of time. People are assigned personal IPs and the authorities get extremely tweeky about people trying to get private IP access. If access is wireless you could dump people offline remotely quite easily and that could be quite catastrophic if a lot of technology is based around implants and personal verification.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Shades of the episode of the Simpsons where Bart sells his soul....